1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a collaboration suite application, and more particularly, to allowing a user to more effectively and efficiently use a calendaring application.
2. Description of the Related Art
Collaboration suite applications typically include functionality such as email messaging, calendaring, and contact storage and retrieval, where email messages, calendar appointments, contacts, etc. are commonly referred to as “mailbox items.” The Zimbra Collaboration Suite from Zimbra, Inc. (San Mateo, Calif.), Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook from Microsoft Corp. (Redmond, Wash.), and Lotus Notes from IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) are examples of collaboration suite applications. Web based collaboration suites, such as those from Yahoo (Sunnyvale, Calif.), and Google (Mountain View, Calif.) are also becoming increasingly popular.
The importance of calendaring applications in collaboration suites has risen over the last several years, as they have increasingly replaced traditional paper and pen calendars and/or appointment diaries. Not only are such calendaring applications paperless, but their usefulness is further enhanced by of their interaction with other aspects of collaboration suites, such as email. For instance, invitations for meetings can be emailed to invitees, and their responses (e.g., acceptances, rejections etc.) can be stored within the corresponding calendar event. Moreover, it is often possible within an organization to check the schedules of invitees in a meeting in order to determine a suitable meeting time. In some collaboration suite applications, it is even possible to see the calendars of various invitees in a meeting simultaneously, so that available times for scheduling a meeting can be easily determined. It is possible, in several collaboration suite applications, to view shared calendars side by side.
There are, however, several potentially useful features relating to calendaring that have not been conventionally implemented in conventional collaboration suite clients & servers, especially those which include seamless interaction of the calendaring application with other applications. Consider an example—if a user is viewing his email, and wants to schedule a meeting, conventionally the user would have to open the calendaring application within the collaboration suite before he can do so. Then the user would need to return to the email application in order to continue viewing his emails. It is also not possible to simply drag an email to a specific date on the calendar, and have useful interactions (e.g., creating a meeting proposal for that day, with the invitees being the recipients of the email). Furthermore, date objects in email with calendaring functionality are not traditionally available. For instance, it is not traditionally possible to have date-related words (e.g., today, tomorrow, and yesterday) in emails to be associated with specific dates (e.g., based on the send date of the email).
Several other added functionality enhancements are possible, such as easier sharing of calendars within an organization, as well as sharing of calendars outside of an organization, easier scheduling of meetings, better UIs to view meetings with different statuses (e.g., accepted, rejected, tentatively accepted, etc.) on a calendar, and so on, to mention just a few.
Thus there is a need for a method and system for seamlessly integrating various elements of a collaboration suite application with the calendaring application. Furthermore, there is a need for a method and system which provides such integration within a web-based collaboration suite application. Moreover, there is a need for enhanced UI for various functionalities available in a calendaring application.